Tomcats deserve their reputation for being promiscuous, “no-commitment” types, and they seldom play any positive role in raising kittens (their own or any other tom’s). They do occasionally kill kittens—their own, or those of other toms. Why they do so is not entirely clear. One theory is (brace yourself) that a tom may sexually mount a female kitten and give it the usual
mating bite in the neck—the bite that an adult female cat in heat endures easily enough, but which is often fatal to a tiny kitten.
